Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals

by J. C. Lawson

As regards the part taken by the next of kin to the murdered man in furthering the work of vengeance, I find no reason to suppose that literature deviated in any way from popular tradition. The idea of the vendetta is essentially primitive and at the same time perfectly harmonious with the belief that the murdered man is capable of executing his own revenge. The acknowledged power of the dead man has never in the minds of the Greek people served as an excuse for his kinsmen to sit idle; rather it has been an incentive to them to assist more strenuously in the task of vengeance, lest they themselves also should fall under the dead man’s displeasure. On this point ancient lore and modern lore are completely agreed.

The best exponents of this view at the present day are a people who can claim to be the most distinctively Hellenic inhabitants of the Greek mainland. The peninsula which terminates in the headland of Taenarum is the home of a race which is historically known to be of more purely Greek descent than the inhabitants of any other district, and which both in physical type and in social and religious customs stands apart—the Maniotes. Among their customs is the vendetta, and the beliefs on which it rests are in brief as follows. A man who has been murdered cannot rest in his grave until he has been avenged, but issues forth as a vrykolakas athirst for his enemy’s blood; for, in Maina, one who has turned vrykolakas for this cause is still credited with some measure of reasonableness. To secure his bodily dissolution and repose, it is incumbent upon the next of kin to slay the murderer or, at the least, some near kinsman of the murderer. Until that be done, the son (to take the most common instance) lies under his dead father’s curse; and, if he be so craven or so unfortunate as to find no opportunity for vengeance, the curse under which he has lived clings to him still in death, and he too becomes a vrykolakas.

The Maniote doctrine then amounts to this, that the murdered man rises from his grave to execute his own vengeance, which consists in bringing upon his murderer the same fate as he himself has suffered through his enemy’s deed—a violent death and consequently resuscitation; but at the same time he demands the assistance of his nearest kinsman, under pain of suffering a like fate hereafter if his efforts in the cause of vengeance are feeble or fruitless. Thus the belief in powerful and vindictive revenants forms the very mainspring of the vendetta.

To this view both Euripides and Aeschylus subscribe in telling the story of Orestes. In the former we have the answer made by Orestes himself to the tirade of Tyndareus[1114] against the vendetta: ‘Nay, if by silence,’ he says, ‘I had consented unto my mother’s deeds, what would my dead sire have done to me? Would he not have hated me and made me the sport of Furies? Hath my mother these goddesses at her side to help her cause, and hath not he that was more despitefully used?’[1115] Surely no clearer statement could be made of Orestes’ apprehension that, if he should fail in the duty which his dead father imposed upon him, the dead man would turn other ministers of his vengeance upon his cowardly son, to plague him, as if he were an accomplice, with the same punishment as had been designed for the actual author of the murder. And similarly in Aeschylus we have the retort of Orestes to his mother’s last warning before he slays her. ‘Beware,’ she says, ‘the fiends thy mother’s wrath shall rouse’; and he answers, ‘But, an I flag, how should I ’scape my sire’s?’[1116] Thus according to the ancient tragedians the vendetta of Orestes was prompted by the same beliefs and fears as still stir the Maniotes thereto.

So far then as concerns the vengeance for Agamemnon’s death, ancient drama added no new element to the popular beliefs, but was able to satisfy the requirements of art by judicious selection from them. The idea, to which the Maniotes still cling, that the murdered man in the form of a revenant avenges his own wrongs, is, save for the rare verbal allusions which we have noticed, rejected, and forms no part of the plot; but the belief, that fear of the dead man’s wrath is a cogent motive to action on the part of his kinsman, is retained. And here it is interesting to observe that Aeschylus even justifies his rejection of the first half of the popular doctrine, and that too by a plea perfectly satisfactory to the popular mind. Agamemnon’s case was peculiar. Not only had he been murdered, but his dead body according to Aeschylus, who is followed in this by Sophocles[1117], had been mutilated (ἐμασχαλίσθη) by his murderers. The effect of such mutilation, as we have seen, was to render the revenant powerless to wreak vengeance with his own hands. Hence the work devolving upon Orestes would have been, in popular esteem, doubled; if murder alone had been committed, he would have worked in conjunction, as it were, with the dead man; but the super-added mutilation incapacitated the dead man for bodily work, and placed the whole burden of retribution on the shoulders of his son. This, plainly put, is the meaning of the words spoken by the Chorus in the Choephori to Orestes: ‘Yea, and he was mutilated, for thou must know the worst. Cruel was she in the slaying of him, cruel still in the burial, in that she thought to make his doom a burden past bearing upon thy life[1118].’ Thus it may be claimed that Aeschylus, in the peculiar conditions of the case which he here presents, follows unswervingly the popular doctrine. It is only Euripides who can fairly be said to have really suppressed anything in this part of the story without troubling to justify himself by the circumstances of Agamemnon’s fate. But even Euripides, though he simply ignores in his plot the possibility of Agamemnon’s bodily resuscitation, is faithful to the doctrine that the next of kin was actuated in seeking vengeance not by simple piety but by a lively fear of the dead man’s wrath.

Moreover, this conception of the relations subsisting between the murdered man and his nearest kinsman did not merely furnish the motif of some fine passages of Tragedy; it served also a more prosaic purpose, and actually formed the basis first of Attic law concerning blood-guilt, and then of Plato’s Laws in the same connexion.

At Athens, as is well known, the duty of prosecuting a murderer (or homicide) was imposed by law upon the nearest relative of the murdered man. But the obligation was not only legal; it was also, and indeed primarily, religious. The law did no more than affirm and regulate a custom which religious tradition had long established. To this fact Antiphon especially bears witness in certain passages[1119] with which I must deal more fully later; but the whole tenor of his appeals to the religious feelings and fears of the jury is strictly in accord with the Maniote doctrine of the present day, save that in one small point he takes a more merciful view. In Maina it is held that, if the next of kin fail to avenge the dead man, no matter to what cause the failure be due, he falls a prey to the dead man’s wrath. Antiphon on the contrary asserts that, if the next of kin have honestly done his best to bring the murderer to justice, he will not be punished for failure therein; and yet he does not represent the dead man as inactive in such a case, but dares to threaten the jury that the murdered man’s anger will now descend, not upon his kinsman who has loyally striven to avenge him, but upon the jury who, by unjustly acquitting and harbouring[1120] the murderer, make themselves accomplices in his crime and sharers in his pollution. This difference of opinion however is of minor importance, and seems to be almost a necessary result of different social conditions. In ancient Athens the next of kin was required to proceed against the murderer by legal means, and not to commit a breach of law and order by personal violence. In modern Maina the kinsman who should have recourse to law and call in the police would be accounted a recreant; public opinion requires him to find an opportunity, openly or by ambush, of slaying the murderer with his own hand; this is to be his life’s work, if need be, and the possibility of failure, save through want of enterprise and energy, is hardly contemplated. But as regards the main issue, namely the belief that the dead man himself is the prime avenger of his own wrongs and that his kinsman acts only under his instigation as an assistant in the work, modern superstition has the entire support both of the drama and of the law of ancient Athens.

Further corroboration is perhaps unnecessary; yet Plato’s legislation in the matter of homicide must not be passed over; for it possesses this peculiar interest and importance of its own, that it was confessedly based upon a religious doctrine which Plato esteemed ‘old even among the traditions of antiquity[1121].’ From what source he obtained the doctrine he does not definitely say; but, from a mention of Delphi in the passage immediately preceding as the supreme authority in all matters of purification from blood-guilt, it may fairly be surmised that this too is a piece of Delphic lore. At any rate Plato accepted it as an authoritative pronouncement to which the homicide must pay due heed.

‘The doctrine,’ says Plato, ‘is that one who has lived his life in the spirit of a free man and meets with a violent death is wroth, while his death is yet recent, against the man who caused it, and when he sees him going his way in the places where he himself was wont to move, he strikes[1122] him with the same quaking and terror with which he himself has been filled by the violence done to him, and in his own confusion confounds his enemy and all his doings to the utmost of his power, aided therein by the slayer’s own conscience. And that is why it is right that the doer of the deed should in deference to the sufferer withdraw for the full space of the year, and should keep clear of the whole country which the dead man had frequented as his native land; and if the dead man be a foreigner the slayer must hold aloof from the foreigner’s country for the same period. Such then is the law; and, if a man voluntarily observe it, the dead man’s nearest kinsman, whose duty it is to look to all this, must respect the slayer, and will do right to be at peace with him; but, if the slayer disregard this law and either presume to enter holy places and to sacrifice before he be purified, or, again, refuse to fulfil the allotted period in retirement, the nearest of kin must proceed against him on a charge of homicide, and, if a conviction be obtained, the penalties are to be doubled. But if the nearest of kin do not seek vengeance for the deed, it is held that the pollution devolves upon him, and that the sufferer (i.e. the dead man) turns upon him the suffering (i.e. that which the homicide himself should have incurred), and anyone who will may bring a suit against him and obtain a sentence of banishment for five years[1123].’

Now for a right appreciation of this passage it must be borne in mind that Plato introduces his old tradition à propos of unintentional homicide. The actual penalties therefore are of a milder nature than those with which we have hitherto been concerned. Indeed it is not the difference in the penalties which should cause any surprise, but rather that an unintentional act should be punished at all; and it would seem perhaps that in citing this doctrine Plato sought to justify himself in retaining a provision of Attic law which at first sight appeared unjust. In Athens[1124], we know, the involuntary homicide was required not only to undergo purification but to withdraw for a whole year from the country of the man whom he had slain. The hardship of this was manifest, and yet Plato acquiesced in the righteousness of it for the reason apparently that the year’s retirement[1125] was not a penalty imposed by the state, but a satisfaction which, according to religious tradition, the dead man demanded and might even himself enforce.